The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry

The Sewanee Review is proud to announce that Billy Collins is the 25th recipient of the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Through the generosity of Dr. K. P. A. Taylor, the Sewanee Review established an annual award in 1987 honoring a distinguished American poet for the work of a career.  Howard Nemerov was the first poet honored and was followed by Richard Wilbur, Anothony Hecht, and W. S. Merwin.  The other recipients of this important prize (which cannot be applied for) include Gwendolyn Brooks, Maxine Kumin, Wendell Berry, and more recently, Anne Stevenson, John Haines, Donald Hall, and Louise Glück.

Bruce Weber of the New York Times crowned Billy Collins “the most popular poet in America” in 1999, and since then the poet’s readership and reputation have continued to grow.  Indeed, though Collins prides himself on having been born in the same hospital in which William Carlos Williams worked as a pediatrician, the poet whom Collins has been most compared to is Robert Frost—perhaps the highest praise an American poet can receive.  Like Frost, Collins’s poetry is decidedly unpretentious, demotic in tone, witty without lapsing into vulgarity, and capable of profound, if subtle, observations about life’s ordinary incidents.  The late John Updike, himself a good writer of light verse, admiringly said of him, “Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . limpid, gently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.” The critic John Taylor has similarly noted in Poetry: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”  

Having gained notoriety after his fourth book, Questions About Angels (1991), was selected by Ed Hirsch for the 1990 National Poetry Series, Collins has gone on to publish nine more books of poetry, in addition to editing three volumes of poetry.  James Crews says of Collins's latest, Horoscopes for the Dead, "It becomes apparent once more in this book that Collins is not just writing for the appreciation of other poets (as writers often do these days); his project is a poetics for the guy in the pick-up, the granddad in the La-Z-Boy, the mother reading on the plane."  Still, Publisher's Weekly points out, as usual "Collins is after the big questions: of life, death, and how to live."  Given both the quality and quantity of his work, it’s easy to see how Collins was appointed this country’s poet laureate from 2001 through 2003; but what is more interesting is how a poet in a society largely inattentive to poetry routinely sells out his public readings.

Born in New York City in 1941 (where he now teaches at Lehman College in the Bronx), Collins earned his B.A. at Holy Cross before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside.  His career as a published poet did not begin until he was forty, however; teaching was always his first ambition, and he admits to entertaining “this idea of [himself] as a scholar/gypsy, teaching at a Caribbean college and the University of South Hawaii.”  Collins admits that what he wrote early on was mostly doggerel and poor imitations: “I was disguising myself as Lawrence Ferlinghetti for a while, and then for a long time as Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. . . . The poet emerged gradually.”   

That emergence was not accomplished by “finding his voice”—a concept Collins finds humorous, “like it’s behind the sofa cushions”—but rather by recognizing that his poetic voice inhered within: “I grew by allowing aspects of myself that I had previously excluded into the poetry.”  Thus Collins’s poetry is distinctly his own.  At times it can be funny, like Collins himself; and, despite having received his doctorate in romantic poetry, Collins finds fault in the romantic aesthetic because it lacks humor, which “if you look before 1798 [the year Lyrical Ballads was published] you find plenty of.” Collins also rejects the “mistaken modernist belief that there [is] an unbreakable connection between value and difficulty.”  Instead Collins approaches writing poetry with a refreshingly relaxed and playful attitude, intent on highlighting the search for life’s mysteries.  “In a poem,” he says, “the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.  You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.”

When I finally pulled onto the shoulder

of a long country road

after driving a few hundred miles

without stopping or even blinking,

I sat there long enough to count

twenty­-four cows in a wide, sloping pasture.

Nothing about the scene asked to be changed,

things being just what they were,

and there was even a green hill

looming solidly in the background.

Still, I felt the urge

to find a pencil and edit one of them out,

that swaybacked one standing

in the shade in a far corner of the field.

I was too young then to see

that she was staring into the great mystery

just as intently as her sisters,

her gorgeous, brown and white, philosophic sisters.

                                    —Billy Collins, “Revision”